Silicon Valley, Where Mass Transit Goes to Die

Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) -- California’s Silicon Valley has
always posed a certain challenge to urbanists. In their view,
cities are critical for commerce and innovation.

For a while, the sprawling office parks in the Santa Clara
Valley south of San Francisco seemed to put a lie to that idea.
If city living was in, then why did a 20-year-old Mark
Zuckerberg leave the walkable streets of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to start his company down the street from the Los
Altos Golf and Country Club?

That was then. Silicon Valley’s engineers already flee the
suburbs at night, riding company shuttles and the Caltrain
commuter rail system from the office parks home to hip
neighborhoods in San Francisco. And the newer social-media
darlings -- Twitter Inc., Instagram Inc., Pinterest Inc. -- are
moving their offices to downtown San Francisco, cutting out the
Valley entirely. Zuckerberg said that if he could do it over
again, he would have stayed in Boston.

Silicon Valley could have followed in the path of northern
Virginia, which sprouted apartment buildings and office towers
along its Washington Metro lines and now attracts many young
people seeking urban living.

But the Valley, the golden hub of American invention and
home to the best engineers in the world, has nothing like the
Metro.

Freeway Locations

The main job centers have access only to Caltrain, with
little capacity left to spur the new, transit-oriented
development that young engineers and software designers demand.
Google Inc. is in Mountain View, and Facebook Inc. recently
moved to Menlo Park, but neither company’s campus is anywhere
near its town’s commuter-rail station. The rich, large
technology companies instead buy cheaper property along the
freeways.

Yet transit in Silicon Valley doesn’t suffer from want of
regional funding. From the Bay Area Rapid Transit, the first big
post-World War II subway project in the U.S., in the 1960s, to
the half-dozen projects under construction across the region
today, Bay area leaders have had no trouble wrangling money from
local taxpayers and the federal government for trains.

Spending money, though, is a lot easier than building
transit. All too often, flashy and expensive commuter projects
are financed while more practical ideas for maximizing the
existing infrastructure are neglected and delayed.

With stations in every major town in Silicon Valley,
Caltrain, which runs 79 miles from San Francisco to San Jose and
beyond, would seem to be well-positioned to form the transit
backbone of America’s technology hub.

Instead, the line offers only hourly service off-peak, and
rush-hour service is packed. Its tracks are not electrified, and
its San Francisco terminal is slightly more than a mile short of
the financial district, which has the region’s largest
concentration of jobs and a network of transit connections.

Bringing the service downtown has been under consideration
since the state began subsidizing it in 1980, but Caltrain is
the ugly stepchild of Bay area transit, and the project has
never been funded.

Many other projects in Silicon Valley, though, have been.

The first new project was the Santa Clara Valley
Transportation Authority’s light-rail system. The system runs
from highway-choked downtown San Jose through the suburban
office parks of the Santa Clara Valley. You’re more likely to
find parking lots than houses and jobs next to stations, and the
authority has added to the expanse of asphalt with a few surface
lots of its own, which remain 80 percent empty. The San Jose
Mercury News published an article on its 25th anniversary
calling it “among the nation’s worst” light-rail lines.

Poor Performance

Despite this record, the network expanded many times, paid
for by dedicated sales taxes and the federal government. Another
extension is planned at a cost of $310 million.

Kevin Connolly, the authority’s transportation planning
manager, told the Mercury News that the poor performance is due
to the decision to route the line along undeveloped land and to
try to “graft a big-city transit type of mode onto a suburban
environment.”

Strange, then, that his agency is taking on yet another
“big-city transit type”: the BART extension from the East Bay
city of Fremont through Santa Clara County, the home of Silicon
Valley. The original $6.1 billion plan was to build a subway
through downtown San Jose, the county seat, but it was scaled
back to a $2.1 billion, two-stop elevated extension.

The project’s champion is the Silicon Valley Leadership
Group, the high-technology trade association that has been
instrumental in gaining support for sales-tax measures to fund
transportation projects.

Its leader, Carl Guardino, said in an interview that his
group has also advocated for Caltrain, and that he hoped to see
a ballot measure pass in 2016 to give the system a permanent
revenue source. He also said there is no conflict between
building new systems throughout Silicon Valley and maintaining
Caltrain.

In explaining why the group chose to push the lengthy
Silicon Valley extension before Caltrain’s short downtown
extension -- both of which are vying to become the first direct
link between San Jose to downtown San Francisco -- he cited the
high predicted ridership of the BART extension.

The 16.1-mile BART subway extension, he said, is expected
to carry 98,000 daily passenger trips by 2030. “For context,”
he said, “that’s twice what the popular Caltrain commuter
system carries on its entire 79-mile line.”

Will those riders materialize? Matt Williams, a former
director of the East Bay’s AC Transit, doubts they will. “The
last big extension was to the San Francisco airport,” he said
in an interview, “and the ridership estimate for that extension
hasn’t panned out.”

Ridership Disappoints

Richard Mlynarik, a retired Bay area transit activist, also
doubts that the new suburban San Jose stations can become as
popular by 2030 as the BART stations in the dense neighborhoods
of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are today, as the
projections indicate.

Guardino says this is an unfair comparison, and doesn’t
take into account the development planned for these suburban
locations. He pointed to the Silicon Valley town of Milpitas,
which has a project under way for housing, retail stores, hotels
and offices around its BART station. (The town’s planning
director complained in 2010 that the station plan was a “sea of
asphalt,” with too much land dedicated to parking.)

San Jose’s new light rail and BART extension are hardly the
only projects planned near, but not for, the Caltrain corridor.

There’s also the Central Subway, promoted by a San
Francisco power broker, Rose Pak. The subway will connect
Caltrain’s northern terminal south of downtown to Chinatown, and
it somehow managed to win state money earmarked for high-speed
rail on the basis that it will enable “connectivity.”

Never mind that the Central Subway’s connective benefits
are weak to begin with, given that it will require a transfer
and won’t reach the Financial District or provide easy access to
either of the city’s two subways. And any connective advantages
will largely evaporate once the high-speed-rail line reaches its
final terminal.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi, both San Franciscans, supported the project in
Washington, with Pelosi even winning an exemption from the
Federal Transit Administration’s cost-effectiveness standards.
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown now advises AECOM
Technology Corp., the engineering company set to manage the
Central Subway construction.

For decades, the Bay area has thrown federal, state and
local money at new commuter-transit projects, while the share of
Silicon Valley residents who use mass transportation has barely
budged. Building transit is a worthy goal, but if Silicon Valley
residents and businesses want to get their money’s worth and
promote good urban-planning practices, they can start by
investing in the infrastructure they already have.

(Stephen Smith is a writer based in New York who covers
real estate, land use and mass transportation. The opinions
expressed are his own.)